The Waxing Moon
The hedges are loud with hawthorn now, and the swallows are back in the rafters, picking up nests they left in September. This week: a man on a horse buried in flowers, riding blind through a Derbyshire village; the small flowers that survive on ground nobody got round to improving; gooseberries cooked green with elderflower into a fool; and the Saxon corner stones of a thousand-year-old church.
On the Horizon
A silver sliver of the waxing moon hangs in the western twilight this week, caught between day and dark for an hour or more before the sky fully darkens. The earth is warm and crumbly under the hand now, ready for the first tender seedlings of the kitchen garden. Swallows are busy with mud and straw in the rafters of barns that have housed them for generations, the old nests repaired and the new ones begun. Out on the chalk, sheep are being gathered for the annual inspection as the heat of late spring lifts. The first broad beans are ready to shell, the pods still small enough that the beans are the size of a thumbnail, sweet and tender enough to consider eating raw. And in west London the Chelsea Flower Show opens this week, the annual well-mannered argument about whether gardens should be practical or merely theatrical. Stand under the barn eaves at dusk and you will hear them before the light has fully gone — the swallows working late, the way they do only in the first fortnight back.
The Sky This Week
Sunrise 4:56 am · Sunset 8:58 pm
Moon Waxing crescent · First Quarter Sat 23 May, 12:12 BST
Harwich tides Low 9:21 am · High 3:43 pm · Low 9:55 pm.
The crescent sits low in the south-west after sunset, visible clear of the horizon for an hour or more before the sky fully darkens. It thickens each night through the week, and by Saturday afternoon reaches first quarter — half-illuminated, riding high to the south at dusk, setting in the west around one in the morning. After Saturday the moon climbs higher and stays up longer with each passing night. The old English gardening calendar held this half of the lunar month, new to full, to be the right time to sow above-ground crops; any seed sown this week is on the right side of it.
Source: timeanddate.com (Baldock) · Royal Observatory Greenwich · UKHO EasyTide
The Curious Instance of the Castleton Garland Day
On the evening of 29 May, in the high valley between Mam Tor and Lose Hill, a man on a horse rides through the village of Castleton invisible from the waist up. He is a beehive of flowers — hyacinths, wallflowers, forget-me-nots, tulips and rhododendrons in horizontal rows around a wooden frame thatched with straw. The structure is over three feet across and weighs nearly four stone. Two men lift it onto his shoulders. He is the Garland King, and he cannot see where he is going.
The Castleton Garland is one of the rare old customs we can actually date. The Castleton Churchwardens’ Accounts for 1749 record a payment of eightpence “for an iron rod to hang ye ringers Garland in,” and the following year three shillings for “ringers on 29th May.” Earlier than 1749 is conjecture; from 1749 onward the parish was paying for it. The leading theory is that the original was a decoration that hung inside the church alongside the rushes brought in for warmth — the floor was unpaved and rush-strewn until 1820. Once it was paved and the rushes stopped coming, the garland left the church and went onto a man’s shoulders. By the 1880s Alfred Burton was watching four men spend five hours a year building one.
The procession winds through the village with the band, stopping at each pub. At the churchyard gates the small posy at the top, called the Queen, is laid on the war memorial. The garland itself is hauled up the tower of St Edmund’s and impaled on a pinnacle, where it stays until the flowers wilt. The custom has had its critics: some years ago a vicar climbed the tower and threw the garland off the parapet, having decided the whole thing was pagan. The village put it back up the same evening, and it has been up every year since.
Sources: Castleton Churchwardens’ Accounts, 1749–1750 · Alfred Burton, Rush-Bearing (1891) · Castleton Historical Society (timing confirmed annually)
The Heath
The May Heath
Lowland acid grassland in the third week of May is the closest thing left to what southern England looked like before the plough and the fertiliser. Find a piece and stand on it. There is not much left. The species that grow on it were the species that grew everywhere three centuries ago, and what has replaced them across most of the landscape is a green monoculture of rye-grass that supports almost nothing.
The gorse is in its second flush. The first flowering happened back in February on the old growth, and the new shoots have just caught up. On a warm afternoon the coconut scent carries across the whole heath, stronger and more specific than any textbook description suggests.
Down at ground level, the milkwort is just appearing in the short turf. Polygala vulgaris is a small creeping thing carrying flowers that can be pink, white, or blue, sometimes all three on a single stem. The blue is the one that catches you — not the violet-leaning shade of a bluebell but a clear acid blue that does not quite look like any other blue in the English flora. The giveaway species at walking pace is heath bedstraw, a tiny white four-petalled flower less than a centimetre across, growing in dense low mats. Sheep’s sorrel is the other reliable indicator, its rust-red seed spikes turning whole patches the colour of dried blood from a distance. Tormentil creeps along the ground between them.
What makes the third week of May the moment is the narrow window. By the second week of June the coarser grasses (false oat-grass, cock’s-foot, Yorkshire fog) will have shot up to waist height and drawn a curtain over everything beneath. Right now the turf is still short enough to see through. Get down on your hands and knees if you have to. There are species at your feet this fortnight that will not be visible again for fifty weeks.
The economic reason the common was left un-improved is the same reason it still supports the flora: the ground was too sandy, too acid, or too steep for anything else, and nobody could think of a use for it that would repay the cost of draining, liming and reseeding. It does what it has always done, because nobody ever got round to stopping it.
Sources: Polygala vulgaris — Wildlife Trusts · Heath bedstraw, sheep’s sorrel — Wildlife Trusts
The Garden Plot
Weather Watch
The unsettled run breaks on Thursday. Showers and longer spells of rain run through Tuesday and Wednesday, then drier, warmer air pushes in from mid-week. High pressure is expected to settle the Bank Holiday weekend across England and Wales. Thursday looks the warmest day with highs near 22°C, and the bank holiday itself stays fair and warm — cloudier and showery only further north and west. Frost is still possible on the clearest rural nights at the start of the week.
The Longer Game
The dahlias and gladioli go in this week, with the tender perennials. The frost risk is largely past across most of England by the third week of May, and the soil is warm enough now that the tubers will start moving. Plant a dahlia tuber on its side, ten centimetres deep, eye facing up, and then leave it alone — don’t water until you see growth coming through, because wet ground around a dormant tuber just rots it. If you’re growing a tall variety, push the stake in at planting. Do it later and you put the stake straight through the tuber.
This Week
Shell the first broad beans while they’re still small and sweet. Thumb-nail sized is perfect — eaten raw, with good oil and a flake of salt. Once they reach the size of a full thumbnail they’re a different, starchier thing entirely, and want cooking. Pick the lower pods first, since they’re the oldest, and work your way up the plant over the next three weeks.
Maintenance
Mulch the beds while the soil is still warm and moist. A five-centimetre layer of garden compost or bark around established plants holds the moisture through June and suppresses most of the weeds for the rest of the season. Keep it off the stems; a collar of bare soil around each plant stops the rot. An afternoon’s work, and you won’t be watering in July.
The Larder
Gooseberries
Down in the kitchen garden, the first green gooseberries are already on the bushes. Hard, sour, and the size of a small marble, they’re ten weeks off the dessert berries you’ll eat off the stem in July; right now they’re exactly what the kitchen wants. The green gooseberry is a cooking fruit, not a fresh one, and the third week of May is its moment.
Eliza Acton, in Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845), gave the standard farmhouse method for a green gooseberry tart: top and tail the berries, stew them very slowly with a little water until they just pop, layer the thick translucent green filling between sweet pastry with heavy spoonfuls of sugar, and bake until set. The acidity of the unripe fruit was the whole point — Acton’s readers wanted a tart that cut through the cream. They were also the readers who consulted the old almanacs about when to sow, and the rule across English gardening folklore from the seventeenth century on was that seeds sown at the waxing moon, the two weeks between new and full, came up faster and more reliably than those sown at the waning. The rule was for above-ground crops; root vegetables were said to do better at the waning moon, when the sap was thought to run down into the soil. The woman picking gooseberries this week is gardening, by the calendar, in the right half of the month.
Gooseberry and Elderflower Fool
After Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845)
Ingredients
- 1 lb green gooseberries, topped and tailed
- 100g caster sugar
- 3 tbsp elderflower cordial
- 300ml double cream
- 4 meringue nests, crushed
Method
- Cook the gooseberries with the sugar and elderflower cordial in a wide pan over a medium heat until the fruit collapses, eight to ten minutes.
- Cool the compote completely.
- Whip the double cream to soft peaks. Fold in the gooseberry compote and the crushed meringue nests.
- Spoon into glasses and serve.
Serves four. The tart gooseberries cut through the cream and the cordial brings the scent of the hedge into the bowl at the same moment.
And if you have a glut, green gooseberries bottle better than almost any other fruit. Top and tail two pounds, pack them into sterilised Kilner jars to within an inch of the top, cover with a hot syrup of one part sugar to two parts water, seal, and process in a water bath at simmering point for twenty-five minutes. Stored somewhere cool and dark they keep for at least a year, and come out of the jar tasting of the May they were picked in. Yorkshire gardeners, the great gooseberry-growers of the Southern Pennines, have been bottling them this way since before Acton was writing.
Sources: Eliza Acton, Modern Cookery for Private Families (1845) · Ribes uva-crispa — RHS
The Still-Room
Wall Pennywort
On old stone walls in the damper parts of the country, wall pennywort is pushing out from the mortar this week. It is a small fleshy plant with round, succulent, shallow-cupped leaves the size of a five-pence piece, sitting flat against the stone in dense colonies. Umbilicus rupestris, the navel of the rock. It is a plant of Cornwall, Devon, and the Welsh borders above all, where the air is damp enough that the walls themselves stay slightly wet for half the year. In Cornwall it was called penny-pie, and the children ate the leaves raw on the way home from school. Mild, juicy, faintly cucumber-flavoured, not unlike a flat version of purslane.
The other name is navelwort, after the small dimple in the centre of each leaf, and the older folk use was as direct as the name suggests. Country mothers across the West Country pressed a fresh leaf, dimple-down, against the navel of an infant who had developed a hernia or umbilical rupture. The practice was recorded into the early twentieth century by Charlotte Latham among others, and the logic was the doctrine of signatures — a plant shaped like the part of the body it was meant to heal was considered to have been put there for that purpose. Whether the leaf actually helped is another question; that the mothers reached for it first is not in doubt.
The more general use was as a cooling poultice for hot, inflamed skin. The leaves are over ninety per cent water, and the cell walls hold the moisture against the skin in a way a wet cloth does not. Culpeper, in 1653, recommended pennywort for “hot pustules and inflammations of the skin” and for “kibed heels” (chilblains) with a method that has not changed in three hundred and seventy years.
Pennywort Cooling Poultice for Inflammation
After Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physitian (1653)
Materials
- A small handful of fresh wall pennywort leaves — the older, larger leaves, not the young rosettes
- A clean cotton cloth or a strip of bandage
Method
- Pick the leaves on a dry morning. Rinse quickly under cold water and pat dry.
- Bruise them lightly with the back of a spoon to release the juice.
- Layer the leaves dimple-down directly on the inflamed skin — sunburn, a fresh insect bite, a patch of eczema, a heat rash.
- Hold in place with the cloth or bandage for ten minutes. Repeat three or four times a day, using fresh leaves each time.
The cooling effect is immediate and lasts about half an hour. Bruised leaves wilt within minutes and lose the effect — pick fresh each time. Pennywort is common enough that a dozen leaves will not damage a colony.
Sources: Nicholas Culpeper, The English Physitian (1653) · Charlotte Latham, West Sussex Superstitions (1878) · Umbilicus rupestris — Wildlife Trusts
The Weekend Walk
The Saxon Quoins
If you want to look at something genuinely old this weekend, find your nearest Norman or pre-Norman village church and walk round the outside. Look at the corners. In a small number of English country churches, particularly in Northamptonshire and Lincolnshire, the corner stones of the tower or nave are not laid in the regular Norman pattern. Instead, tall vertical stones alternate with broad horizontal ones, like the rungs of a ladder turned through ninety degrees. This is Saxon long-and-short work, and it dates the building to the late tenth or early eleventh century. The classic examples are at Earls Barton, Barnack, and Brigstock. Closer to home, the west tower of St Mary’s at Reed, near Royston, keeps its long-and-short quoins on the corners. Any Saxon foundation that survived the Norman rebuilding tends to keep its quoins, often at the base of a tower where later masons stopped short.
While you are there, take thirty paces along the churchyard hedge and count the woody species — hawthorn, blackthorn, field maple, hazel, dogwood, holly, elder, dog rose, spindle. Multiply the number by a hundred for the rough age of the hedge in years, by the Hooper method: five species, around five hundred years; seven, seven hundred. Look for a carved cross or interlace on the highest stone of the quoin. Where there is one, it was cut by men who spoke a language closer to Beowulf than to anything you would recognise and set there to keep the building safe through a thousand years of storms.
Sources: Saxon long-and-short work — Historic England · Hooper’s hedgerow hypothesis — Woodland Trust
An Old Word for It
One old word, chosen for the week.
Gloaming (n., Scots and Northern English) — the slow lingering twilight of a long late-spring or summer evening, when the sun has set but the light holds for another hour. From the Old English glōm, meaning dusk, related to gloom but without the modern weight. In Scots usage the gloaming is a time of day, as specific as noon or midnight. In the third week of May this far south the gloaming runs from about nine to ten thirty, which is the hour the waxing moon is at its clearest in the sky.
In Good Report
A piece of news worth passing on, from this week.
On 13 May, Natural England approved the release of up to twenty young white-tailed eagles into Exmoor National Park over the next three years. The releases extend a programme on the Isle of Wight that has been running since 2019. The last pair to breed in southern England did so in 1780, before the species was shot, trapped and poisoned out of the country. The first Exmoor eagles arrive this summer.
The Turning Wheel
What’s coming, in the next fortnight.
24 May – Whitsun / Pentecost — fifty days after Easter.
25 May – Whit Monday, the old Whitsun bank holiday; and the Spring Bank Holiday.
29 May – Oak Apple Day — Royal Oak Day, the restoration of Charles II in 1660, and the day of the Castleton Garland.
Yours, until next Thursday.
Meg.
